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Rethinking American grand strategy
How to do grand strategy is a key question in foreign policy studies. The subject’s relevance is underlined—rather than undermined—by the rise of unconventional threats: terrorism, pandemics, autocracy and environmental problems. While the United States remains the most powerful country in the world, neither its status nor its ability to meet these new challenges on its own are unchallenged. Crucially, US grand strategy needs to be rethought––and that is the crux of this book. So what is grand strategy? How does it differ from strategic vision? Conventional attempts to define grand strategy often risk reducing it to military strategy and effectively sidelining politics, international law and economics. Moreover, other factors like race, gender, the environment and culture are also important, and a narrower understanding of grand strategy risks overlooking them. In some ways, this is what sets this book apart. Rethinking American grand strategy argues that the concept should take these previously ignored factors into account in order to be more effective (p. 3). The edited volume aims to show that American grand strategy would be more effective if it did not ignore marginalized voices in its design, especially those that traditional scholarship has neglected. The contributors featured include academics from Australia, the US and Europe. The chapters cover the history of American grand strategy up to and including the current era. Fortunately, they do so without the unfortunate ‘exceptionalist’––or rather nationalist––undertones that haunt most of this literature. The book argues that the US needs to integrate its foreign and domestic policies. In the words of James P. Warburg, at the end of the Second World War, ‘foreign policy begins at home’ (p. 218). Part two, on ‘Historical grand narratives’, and part three, on ‘Recasting central figures’, are especially interesting in this regard. In chapter ten, Michaela Hoenicke Moore explores US grand strategy during the Second World War and defines the concept as the ‘meeting point where the international system’s geopolitical constraints intersect with a state’s domestic political culture and its sense of national identity’ (p. 220). Moore questions the relationship between democracy and grand strategy, pointing to public debates in the United States about whether the country should join the war. While appreciating the benefits of trade, investment and good international relations, the vast majority of the American public had rejected Wilsonian ideals and about 70 per cent of the population regarded participation in the First World War as a mistake. Before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor settled the question in favour of the interventionists, most Americans had asked ‘why make the same mistake twice?’ (p. 223). The Second World War was a period of remarkable national unity, and it is remembered in mythical terms as a ‘good war’ fought by the ‘greatest generation’ (p. 219). It also brought the concept of grand strategy to the forefront and laid the foundation for the US’s strategy of containment during the Cold War. The ‘Munich’ analogy, alluding to the Allied efforts to appease Adolf Hitler’s expansionist dreams, was repeatedly used to justify military actions in pursuit of containment that contraDownloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ia/article/99/2/891/7069013 by Chatham House user on 03 May 2023 Book reviews 892 International Affairs 99: 2, 2023 dicted American domestic values and marginalized the role of compromise, diplomacy and negotiations. Chapter ten also highlights four factors that informed the decision to enter the Second World War. It argues that their latter-day manifestations continue to define US grand strategy paradigms. First, President Franklin Roosevelt opposed the Nazi policy of Lebensraum and found Germany’s aspirations to settler colonialism abhorrent. Second, he waited for a German declaration of war, even after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, because he wanted to exhaust all other options. Third, he framed the war in terms of survival and not necessarily democracy; the slogan of a ‘people’s war’ was rejected in favour of ‘the survival war’. Finally, the US had the industrial, military and economic resources that could be mobilized to bring about an Allied victory (p. 223). This excellent edited volume addresses both the main issues of US grand strategy and how to expand the concept. Thus, it approaches grand strategy in America in a new way, whereas its historical interest in issues not normally covered in traditional accounts makes it a welcome addition to the literature.